David Coveney

A personal blog transitioning into an exploration of the intersection of design, technology and ethics

Category: Technical

  • Getting Quicker

    One of the most important things that gets forgotten about when running a WP site is that performance is important.  We see many sites with page load times way in excess of 2,000ms per page.  Often the site just gets progressively slower over time and the change isn’t really noticed.  That had happened with mine,…

  • Blog “Reboot”

    Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout,…

  • WordCamp UK – Great Stuff + a Little Controversy

    I went to WordCamp UK 2010 in Manchester… this is my write-up of the event, and its controversies along with my presentations…

  • Live Threaded Commenting on WP

    At Interconnect IT / Spectacu.la my colleague James has developed a new version of the popular Spectacu.la Threaded Comments plugin.  It’s not yet in release form, but you can grab it from the WordPress.org repository via svn if you know how at http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk/ I’m bringing it up here because I’ve decided to trial the plugin…

  • WordPress Performance, Make it 3x Quicker!

    I’d started to notice that my site could often be slow to load – other sites on the same server weren’t suffering the same way, so I wanted to document a simple way in which one can identify performance issues on the site. This is one of them.

  • Of WordPress Training and Learning

    Over at Interconnect IT, where I work, we’ve found that demand for our WordPress Training Courses has shot up over the past year or so.  And it’s certainly interesting to see where the work comes from. Curiously, it’s very polarised – we either work with smaller one man band companies like Jason Nevin who runs…

  • Is WordPress Slowing My Site Down?

    I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!

  • What it’s Like to Present and Attend at WordCamp UK

    Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

  • Five Things Bing Does Better than Google

    Five Things Bing Does Better than Google

    MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a competent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.

  • mySQL Database Search & Replace With Serialized PHP [Updated]

    Ever needed to migrate a database to a new server or website (especially with WordPress and other PHP applications) and been stuck because when you do a search and replace some of the data seems to get corrupted?